The Mongols were brutal and pragmatic and mobile. I was self-indulgent and listless, but now suddenly obsessed with their stories. When I arrived in Mongolia as a Peace Corps volunteer two years later, it was with a rucksack full of romance, too little long underwear, and a hunger. Mongolians ate horses, and I wanted to join them. I wanted to ingest some history and culture. Perhaps I did a little too much reading.

While horse is commonly eaten in Europe and revered in Japan, most Americans cannot stomach the idea that anyone would eat them. Our aversion to horse meat is so strong that Congress found time even around its quagmires to consider a bipartisan Prevention of Equine Cruelty Act, even though horse slaughter is already basically illegal since the USDA does not grant inspections to equine slaughterhouses. In March, the Missouri House of Representatives, invoking the otherwise unassailable priority of job creation, considered a bill that would make it possible to slaughter horses in Missouri. The effort failed.

Still, despite my hope to eat one there, horses do not want for respect in Mongolia. To see that firsthand, travel in winter on a bus, a Russian relic overfilled with sacks of meat and passengers in cocoons of wool, cashmere, nylon and faux fur. The temperature, vibration and cargo are absolutely numbing. On every trip, however, a child’s voice calls out. Passengers awake from a collective stupor and rub portholes in the ice-coated windows, point, appraise and come alive. Nothing — not five welcome minutes to piss into the snow, not a sacred tree streaming with prayer flags, not even the relief of the capital’s central heating and serviceable vodka — is as dependably remarkable to these travelers as a herd of potbellied horses on the plains.

Horses are sacred animals to the nomadic herders and a powerful symbol for all Mongolians. Like the bald eagle, their well-worn image adorns living rooms, clothing, music videos and the biceps of the patriotic. Unlike the eagle, this animal has a daily role in the life and livelihood of the country. And still people eat them. In a country sustained by mounted herders, horses bring home the bacon and are sometimes themselves the bacon.

I spent my first three months in a small town called Khongor, built around wheat fields and a flour mill. With the withdrawal of Russian support, the mill failed and the town struggled on by providing vegetables, meat and a truck stop to an industrial city 15 kilometers to the north. It was, perhaps, an unlikely place to go looking for the culinary artifacts of empire.

Out of place as I was, I was well taken care of, usually in ways I couldn’t have asked for. Otgonjargal, the woman who first taught me how to eat and speak Mongolian, usually couldn’t figure out what I was asking for either. Each night I pointed at a piece of meat and asked, “What is this?”

“Meat,” she said.

“Oh,” I would say, looking for words in the bare linguistic cupboard of my mind, “but which animal?”

“Sheep. Mutton.”

Not horse. I never failed to look a little downcast before remembering myself and saying a word I thought meant delicious. Later, I found a way to explain myself: “My people eat sheep. We eat goats, sometimes. We eat cows. We eat fish. Chickens too. But we don’t eat horse. Do you eat horse?”

“Sometimes.”

“I want to eat horse.”

Otgonjargal responded to this juvenile broadside with characteristic generosity by bringing me, first, a tin of sardines. I tried to explain that my people didn’t eat fish like this, not usually. But also that these were delicious. And thank you. But we usually ate them larger. “Like this,” and I held up my hand, even made it swim a little. The next day, Otgonjargal’s husband, Chinzorig, brought home a plastic bag filled with palm-size fish from the river.

“Now,” they said, “show us how Americans eat fish.” I had never cleaned a fish before, never chopped off a head or removed scales. I had only watched them arrive at a table sitting proudly on a bed of vegetables or battered and swimming in tartar sauce — so I battered and fried enough fish for each of us to have two mostly edible nuggets.

“Our people don’t eat fish,” they said. “That was … new.” They waited until I retreated to my room, somewhat proud of my role as cultural ambassador, and Otgonjargal made noodles with mutton. I gave up on dietary suggestions and, to get my expectations in line with my experience, on eating horse.

Near the end of the summer, a block of room-temperature meat swaddled in shopping bags materialized on the counter. It shrunk with each meal. For days, I watched it sit just out of the sun and far out of the barely working refrigerator. I noticed a dark yellow strip of fat and an almost disturbingly dark tone of red. I was quietly concerned, but I was even more culturally gung-ho and, besides, no one else was concerned.

At the beginning of a meal near the end of the meat, Otgonjargal’s children delivered my bowl and pointed at it: “Aduu!” At my confused look, they galloped around the living room, around me and my over-full bowl. “Aduu,” they shouted again. Like “cows” become “beef,” in the Mongolian language, horse became something different when made many and made into food. It also became something quite different than I had expected. The meat in the kitchen hasn’t been discolored at all — it was just that horse was a different color.

The community where I ate my horse didn’t look like the camp of history’s greatest conquerors, whatever that was supposed to look like. The horses didn’t look like the graceful televised thoroughbreds that had always been my image of horses. Mongolian horses were built like bikers – thick and shaggy. After the best reading a major library could provide, it took a summer’s worth of dinners to start treating horses the same way I treated most other animals I have regular contact with: less like a symbol, more like food.

When I moved to a provincial center in the Gobi and got more than halfway to fluency, my culinary education accelerated. I shared a yard with the family of two teachers, Oyunchimeg and Erkhembaatar, and I lived in the ger, or yurt, in which they had spent much of their lives together. I earned my meals by glacially peeling potatoes and trying Oyunchimeg’s patience while she did most of the cooking.

She explained, over boiling pots of mutton, that her people did indeed eat horse, but not if they could help it. “Mongolians eat horses,” she said. “We, however, don’t really eat them. And if we do, it’s only in winter. Horse with garlic is good for colds. The broth from boiled horse is bad for your stomach. It just does, and it just is.”

I pressed for concrete reasons, asking why they make these choices and distinctions, in every one of the limited ways I could. Oyunchimeg finally looked impatient. “Because,” she said, “we do.”

Because is rarely a good enough reason for my people to eat horse. Like dogs and cats, horses are so packed with meaning and with our fondness for them that their flesh becomes polluted the moment we turn it into fillets. They occupy pride of place in the sparsely populated pantheon of exceptional animals. No other working animal joins them, and the logic of inclusion is inconsistent. Plenty of pork lovers, after all, also loved Wilbur in “Charlotte’s Web.” No cowboy ever sang ballads about loyal sheep and we don’t teach chickens to nuzzle our faces. Horses in America are, even to avid meat-eaters and city folks, more than the sum of their otherwise edible parts. For all my frustration with Oyunchimeg, the reasons we don’t eat horse — big eyes, sleekness, perceived loyalty, and the national myth of how they helped us “win” the West — can be reduced to because we don’t.

I should have predicted the response when I wrote a matter-of-fact e-mail back home that, in Mongolia, we ate horse. An ex-girlfriend I hadn’t heard from in months wrote to forbid me from horse-eating. My sister-in-law Claire, whose family raises horses in Missouri, suggested — perhaps in jest — that she would stop speaking to me if I kept it up. Some relatives sent me the e-mail equivalent of retching.

A curious or depraved few wrote to ask what horse tastes like. I didn’t really have an answer. It hadn’t been particularly relevant while surrounded by horse-eaters. I know that we ate horse minced in steamed dumplings or fried in meat pies, sliced into bowls of flour noodles and boiled on the bone. I knew it made a serviceable fajita when my parents sent Old El Paso taco packets. I knew the murderous color of red and the Post-it yellow bands of fat. I knew how we ate it and I knew when.

How horse tastes doesn’t have much to do with taste buds or personal preference, especially when the creature in question is old and rangy. Horse doesn’t taste good or bad, as I remember, any more than foods other than bacon and marzipan taste universally good or bad. As with most of what I’ve eaten outside the States, the flavor has less to do with smell and taste than it does with memory and people.

As a university student, before I’d ever seen a dead horse that wasn’t falling from under John Wayne, horse flesh tasted like getting out of the Midwest and becoming someone with a square jaw who told the best stories in the bar. On a Mongolian bus, horse was the realization that matters of taste are often matters of collective taste. With Otgonjargal, it was the sensation of coming-of-age again, a baptism by mincemeat. With Oyunchimeg, horse tasted like becoming family over a bowl of poorly peeled potatoes. At no point, however, do I remember tasting horse flesh itself. I didn’t need to before I left Mongolia, and I’m not sure I want to now.

Kibwe Tavares’ short film “Robots of Brixton” imagines a world where sentient machines are given inhuman treatment by humans. An interesting memorial to the 1981 Brixton riots.

3. Joey Chestnuts, official winner of Nathan’s Famous hot dog eating contest

For the fifth year in a row, Joey “Jaws” Chestnuts won Nathan’s annual hot dog-scarfing contest in Coney Island. 

4. Actual winner of hot dog eating contest

Professional eater Takeru Kobayashi technically ate more ‘dogs on the Fourth than Joey (setting a world record with 69 buns and beef) , but was considered ineligible for the Coney Island event since he won’t sign an exclusive contract with Major League Eating. 

5. Twin infants sync laughter

Well, this is almost as creepy/adorable as those talking babies. 

The most fascinating of these photos is called “Pig Cafeteria”:

The caption reads:

“The Pig Cafeteria” was an exhibit produced by the Department of Agriculture to educate farmers about new methods of farming and raising livestock — specifically, what to feed pigs so that they would be healthy and profitable.

So maybe it’s just poor word choice, because when I see Wilbur here licking his lips and holding out his plate at a Pig Cafeteria, I assume that he will be in for a sad and delicious shock, smothered in barbeque sauce. But maybe Pig Cafeterias are just cafeterias for pigs, not serving them — the way we call where kids eat lunch “Human Cafeterias.”

Definitely check out the rest of the exhibit up in the Times, especially the poster demanding “Eat The Carp”:

Or the kind nurses that come to your home and tell you about the benefits of this “dairy product”:

Man, the past looks totally terrifying and not at all tasty. I’ll take Reagan’s “Catsup is a vegetable” decision* over carp demands or pushy milk women any day. 

*Yes, I know it didn’t actually go down quite like that.

But how “friendly” is Ronald? A new study done by outside marketing group Ace Metric found that in a survey group of 500, an overwhelming amount found a guy with big red lips and white greasepaint more creepy than cute.

McDonald’s refuses to give up on Ronald, though, and its defense on why it needs to keep a terrifying clown as its mascot would be charming if it weren’t so ridiculous and backward. Below, five of the responses McDonald’s has given for keeping Ronald on the payroll.

1. Complaint: “It’s really remarkable how often I saw the word ‘creepy’ [in regards to Ronald],” says the V.P. of a company that conducted the survey.

McDonald’s response: “For everyone who may feel that way, there are more who feel the opposite.”

2. Complaint: Ronald McDonald is an evil clown.

McDonald’s response: “He is a force for good,” says McD’s CEO, Jim Skinner.

3. Complaint: Too many damn clowns running around.

McDonald’s response: “There’s only one Ronald,” McDonald’s chief creative officer Marlena Peleo-Lazar said in response to several questions about how many actors portray the smiling clown.

4. Complaint: He is hurting a brand image that is trying to be more adult … like Starbucks.

McDonald’s response: He is the brand image. “It would be almost as if the Geico gecko disappeared, or the Aflac duck,” says one marketing strategist. God forbid.

5. Complaint: Ronald encourages childhood obesity.

McDonald’s response: Around 2004, McDonald’s christened Ronald as a “balanced, active lifestyles ambassador,” and stuck him in commercials where he trained for the Olympics. He got workout clothes. He got a tuxedo. He moved from McDonaldLand into the real world. 

You know who can also move into the real world after being trapped in a fantasy land? Freddy Krueger.

It’s actually in CAI’s favor to have a scary mascot act as a deterrent for children trying to buy fries. It should be thanking McDonald’s for keeping such a creepy figure right in front of the golden arches.

Following in Hawaii’s footsteps, Washington, Oregon and, most significantly, California have introduced statewide legislation that would make it illegal — and highly fineable — to serve or even possess shark’s fin. (Hawaii’s law calls for fines of $5,000 to $15,000 for even first-time offenders.)

Ban supporters talk about the trade’s inhumane treatment of sharks and an outsize environmental impact. The “Ew-ick-how-can-you-do-that” argument is that fins are largely harvested by cutting them off of live sharks, then dumping the shark back in in the water to die. But the more big-picture concern is about the scale of finning: researchers estimate that 73 million sharks are killed every year to feed an exploding demand in fins by a huge, growing middle class in China. Some scientists estimate that ocean shark populations are just 10 percent of what they used to be, and there’s no telling what kind of impact that can have. As Dan Cartamil, a researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said on the KPBS radio show “These Days,” “You take away the sharks, and, for example, many coral reef ecosystems become degraded. There are suddenly lots of stingrays, because now they have no natural predators, and then they may eat all the oysters, which is a commercial fishery.” And on and on. So the current scale of shark finning is a real problem.

But then I think, again, of my grandfather, and the night he took a teenage me to a nondescript, fluorescent-lit noodle shop in an undistinguished, vaguely smelly part of Macau. Walking past folding tables with diners on stools, going through an unmarked door behind a curtain, we found ourselves suddenly in a plush, one-table dining room, with relatively regal carpeting and a tablecloth of bright red, the color of celebration. I remember the dinner being wonderful, and that the strands of shark’s fin in the soup were thicker than spaghetti, a sign of quality … and extravagant expense. And it became clear that the room, the table, the whole dinner — so strange and luxurious amid such undistinguished circumstances — was built around the event of that soup; the metaphor of that soup was undeniable. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that much of my grandfather’s life was built around that soup, built around the idea that he could show the world and himself that he’d finally made it, that he could literally feed his family his success. For him, and tens of millions like him, that feeling of satisfaction must be unparalleled.

And so foes of the ban, including Chinese American California state Sen. Leland Yee, are tempted to say things like, “This is an attack on Asian culture.” And Jon Kauffman of SF Weekly sharply noted that it’s not hard to see “an anti-Chinese subtext in the ban,” with the language of the debate rife with “echoes of Americans’ fear of the rising Chinese middle class, and the persistent suspicion and disgust many Americans feel toward other cultures’ foods.”

But, Kauffman continues:

“Globally, we’ve reached the point at which the collapse of an ecosystem has to take precedence over one culture’s culinary heritage. No matter who the primary ‘market’ is, overconsumption is taking sharks — and bluefin tuna, and Atlantic cod, and hundreds of other species — away from all of us, and we all have a right to demand action. The situation is becoming drastic, and drastic, across-the-board bans are warranted.”

If the science is correct, I’d have to agree. (Sorry, grandpa. Really. I’m sorry.) I mean, the cultural import of the dish is, to be frank, as much about the demonstration of status as anything else, and there is no limit to the creativity of aspirational culture to come up with the next big status symbol. I mean, go ahead and buy another pair of Prada shoes instead of taking me out for shark’s fin. It’s fine. I don’t mind, and after a while, you’re not going to mind either. After all, the nature of status symbols is that the more they’re attained, the shallower their actual meaning, and the more attractive the next, other thing eventually becomes.

And cultures evolve. As Judy Ki, of a pro-ban group called Asian Pacific Americans Ocean Harmony Alliance, said, “I personally don’t think our culture is that fragile that it would fall apart without one little delicacy. My grandmother’s feet were bound. That was part of ‘our culture,’ and I’m very glad we’ve said that’s wrong.” (It’s worth noting that several California Chinese American legislators support the ban — and the bill was originally co-sponsored by a Chinese American assemblyman.)

But there is something disconcerting about this ban. A Chinese American chef, Jonathan Wu, noted, “It’s a tough call, but I support the ban. While we are at it, I’d also ban Caspian caviar and bluefin tuna [Caspian sturgeon and bluefin tuna are both considered endangered by many scientists] until their fisheries recover — no doubt, that would raise an uproar in certain other cultural communities.”

And that’s the thing: It’s not that this ban is “racist” as some have put it, it’s that it’s the kind of thing that smells a bit of cynical political posturing, scoring cheap environmental points because no politician is going to lose any votes that matter. Get rid of a grody-sounding food that only the Chinese are stupid enough to save up their money for? Easy! Try to take away the endangered tuna from voters’ Friday night sushi date, though, and there’ll be hell to pay. And don’t even think about doing anything about factory farming, the cheap-meat industry that is unequivocally ruining huge swaths of our ecology and our health. It’s not a good state of affairs when we can easily get up a head of steam behind laws that take away others’ pleasures, but refuse to even take a hard look at our own.